Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Frank Drake

Author:Frank Drake [Drake, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385305327
Amazon: 038530532X
Goodreads: 1244251
Published: 2022-09-04T22:31:26+00:00

1 28

&

I S A N Y O N E O U T T H E R E ?

shuttle to show them how terrible i t was fo r their grandmommy and granddaddy, who had to endure tornadoes and mosquitoes and other horrible things.

I attended one of O’Neill’s early lectures at Princeton about the space colonies, just about the time he wrote his popular book The High Frontier. I found him to be a first-rate physicist-a very ingenious, intelligent person with a good grasp of engineering. He is not the least bit flaky, though he attracts flakes like flies, and his name gets bandied about in lots of flaky places.

O’Neill’s idea makes sense because so much less energy is needed to build space colonies in one’s own planetary systemabout one ten-millionth the amount required to travel to another star. Although some might argue that very advanced civilizations, such as a Kardashev Type III, will have access to much greater energy resources than we have, a factor of ten million is very hard to overcome.

Lord Kelvin once said that you don’t know anything in science until you put numbers to it. When I put numbers to the idea of interstellar travel or colonization, it becomes clear that the cost of going to another star is too high. Civilizations can’t venture far from home. Nor do they need to. There is enough energy from our Sun to support, believe it or not, more than a hundred billion billion human beings-an. incredibly greater number than are living now-right in our Solar System.

O’Neill and I eventually parted company, however, when he predicted that in the future his colonies would expand into space until they literally infiltrated the Galaxy in a period of less than a million years. He expects them to reach such distances using rockets driven by a system that Edward Purcell considered years ago in theory-the combining of matter with antimatter.* Hypothesized fuel-injection systems far beyond our present capabilities would allow these oppositely charged particles to come in contact with each other as needed to accelerate or decelerate the space-

* For each particle of ordinary matter, such as an electron or proton, there is a corresponding particle of antimatter, which is equal in mass but opposite in electrical charge. A proton, for example, is a positively charged panicle of matter, and its antimatter equivalent is the negatively charged antiproton. On Eanh, antimatter does not exist, except briefly in the products of the nuclear disintegrations created by physicists in panicle accelerators, or “atom smashers.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.